Life’s Rich Pattern

The Name Game

BY LIZ FOSTER

The hoopla in the US is retreating at last, though the election results remain hotly debated, decried and denied by many. But sifting through reams of analysis, I think I’ve pinpointed the central issue. It went right down to the wire, not because of polarisation, voter fraud or a pervasive sense of distorted reality. It all came down to the candidates’ names.

The name Joe Biden conjures up a certain boy next door kind of image. Bridge players know the trump card is the most powerful and defeats all others. Whereas Biden is an Anglo-Saxon name with roots to the name Button. And where there’s danger of the outgoing President’s moniker throwing up the vision of a white duck in a blue waistcoat, his image is redeemed by his surname. The Democrats must be thanking their lucky stars their candidate doesn’t go by Joe Button, who would surely have been unable to snatch victory from the jaws of defeat. Fiction writers will tell you name choice is an essential tool to shape the character in the reader’s mind. If you want someone that’s smart, strong and resourceful, Katniss Everdeen is going to get you a lot further than Kylie Jones. And you just know someone called Uriah Heap is never going to be likeable. But surnames are a relatively new thing, first used by European nobility and wealthy landowners. Merchants, townspeople and eventually rural folk adopted the custom over several centuries until everyone had to have one (thank the good old Tax Man for that). Smith is one of the most common surnames around because a smith made something, and there were a lot of them. There were blacksmiths, shoesmiths, arrowsmiths, swordsmiths and goldsmiths amongst others. A greensmith worked with copper, a whitesmith with tin. Sickle making was a big enough thing to have its own name – sicksmith. But Smith is the just Anglo name version, as many other countries had their own names for their smiths, such as Faber (Latin), Schmidt (German), Gow (Celtic), Herrero (Spanish) and the East European Kovacs or Kowalski. I’m sorry to report if you have a name associated with the church, like Abbott, Pope or Bishop, it was most likely your ancestor’s nickname, linked to play acting. And if your grandiose surname is in the plural form, like Squires, your forefather is the servant of the great man rather than the great man himself. In Iceland, with few exceptions, a person’s last name indicates the first name of their father (patronymic) or in some cases mother (matronymic), followed by -son (‘son’) or -dóttir (‘daughter’). My Icelandic name by that reckoning would be Elizabeth Grahamdottir, which sounds rather grand if a bit of a mouthful. The Icelanders take their naming heritage very seriously. It’s so enshrined that until recently, any first names not previously used had to first be approved by the Icelandic Naming Committee. In 2016, the Naming Committee refused to accept the names of Duncan and Harriet Cardew—Icelandic-born children of a British father and an Icelandic mother—because their names did not meet the criteria for being added to the registry of approved names, causing all sorts of problems with the passport office. But back to Donald, who’s constant claims of cheating and voter fraud have marked the end of his administration. Vocabulary.com tells us that to ‘trump’ is to outrank or defeat someone or something, often in a highly public way. But the term ‘trump’ originally implied a deceptive form of victory involving cheating, though this has lapsed out of modern use. Maybe Donald’s defining legacy can be its resurrection.

Illustration by Grace Kopsiaftis

Liz Foster is a local writer and author. You can find more Life’s Rich Pattern features and more at www.lizfosterwriter.com